Part of what I do is produce awesome videos for our school and the community. This time, I’m doing a music video for my daughter’s Girl Scout troop – a parody of Shake it Off but about cookies. Without going into tons of detail about the entire process, I want to call attention to a technique I’ve read and watched a lot about but hadn’t gotten a chance to try until now – using slow motion footage for a music video.
Spoiler: Here is the finished product:
Slow Motion
So here’s the idea: a normal video is shot at 24 or 30 frames per second, and played back at the same speed.
Slow motion video is shot at 60 or more frames per second, and played back at 24 or 30 frames per second. If something’s happening at regular speed and shot in a high frame rate, it will look slow when you play it back.
Thus, If something happens at a faster than normal speed and shot in a high frame rate, it will look normal-ish when you play it back. Audio is usually played back at regular speed for a video shoot, and the singer will just sing along with the track to keep it in sync. We then throw away the audio from the shoot, and use the perfectly synced motions of the singer in our video. In this case, we’re making the singer lip sync quickly to the song and slow down the footage later to allow this rapid motion to play back at regular speed with the song.
Why do this? Because it looks awesome! It takes away the awkwardness of the singer just staring at you singing and really sells the action. It makes the whole thing feel a big bigger than life.
Slow motion, Fast music
To do this, I took the song that was to be used for lip-syncing, and made a 160% speed version using Ableton Live. My camera, the Canon XA25, converts 60fps footage to 24fps. Knowing these facts, it will take me speeding up the resultant video to 150% in Final Cut Pro to get something that lip-syncs with the “correct” original song.
Here’s a video showing the difference between the three versions of the speed:
I’ll update this post with the full video when it’s finished. Expect cookie-themed costumes.
